This Side of Glory

by Gwen Bristow

  Once they took a picnic lunch and drove toward the woods, stopping on a road built along the edge of a cypress swamp. They had hardly left the carriage when a mighty rain tumbled upon them, so they scrambled back inside and sat huddled under the rug. Around them the swamp had a strange loveliness. The great cypresses were hung with moss in such thick draperies that there seemed hardly room for leaves to push through, though occasionally one of the trees was bare, holding up crooked white limbs to the rain. The leaves on the live oaks were dull, ready to drop when the new leaves would push them off in March. The only bright color in the swamp was the green of the tree-ferns growing along the branches. Under the oaks the sedges were brown, with a purplish tinge like a veil over them, and the lichens were gray on the cypress trunks growing out of the water, and over everything was the gray moss and the rain.

  It was Kester who showed her the sullen magnificence of the swamp, while Eleanor looked, discovering the joy of becoming sensitive to the beauty of familiar scenes. When at last they drove back through the rain she felt as if she had been on a journey to a place of strange enchantment.

  Often they went to Ardeith, and when she curled up on the rug by the fire and talked to him—on any subject, for sometimes she could hardly remember what they had talked about—Eleanor had a sense of rapture.

  When she went to Ardeith, Kester’s parents were sometimes, though not always, at home. While they were invariably gracious Eleanor could not help regarding them with a secret amusement. Denis and Lysiane, and their numberless cousins who drifted through the house, seemed to her so delicate, like relics that should be kept behind glass. It was the first time she had had a glimpse of the gentle, defeated civilization that in secluded spots like this went on still stunned from the blow of the Civil War. These people were strange to her, yet she could not deny that they had a curious emotional security because it had never occurred to them to doubt their own values. She was continually being surprised at their cool, devastating scorn of people who fell short of their standards; they dismissed everything such a person said and did as of no consequence, so that one felt strangely ill at ease and could not explain why it was so. And they could do this, she concluded with some astonishment, because they were so much more attractive than people could be after fighting the battles necessary for adjustment to a changing world.

  Eleanor thought them pretty but absurd. She could not have made articulate how utterly she felt herself superior to their canons. She sounded Kester as to what he thought of all this, and discovered, not greatly to her surprise, that Kester had never thought about it at all. Kester liked his country; he liked seeing the cotton come up and put forth its white flowers, the flowers turning pink and dropping off to reveal hard little green bolls on the stalks, the bolls opening and the fields turning white with the ripe cotton hanging ready to be picked. He liked these blue February days, the fragrance of the earth turning under the plows, and the prospect of the summer ahead when the earth would go mad with blooming and men would work not to make the plants grow but to check their increase. He liked hunting and riding and dancing and swimming and gathering around the piano with his friends to sing songs.

  “But you don’t know whether or not you like to think,” Eleanor said to him, “because you’ve never tried it.”

  They were driving back to the levee camp after a visit to Ardeith, and Eleanor’s lap was piled with the last poinsettias of the season. It was still early, but two army engineers were coming in for supper and she had to be at home to supervise Randa’s setting of the table. As she spoke Kester gave her a roguish look out of the corner of his eye. “What am I supposed to think about?” he inquired.

  “Don’t you like to find out how people happen to be the way they are?” she asked.

  “No, I can’t say that I do.” He adroitly drove around a wagon lumbering along the middle of the road. “They are the way they are, so what can I do about it?”

  “But don’t you like to understand them?”

  Again he glanced at her, with an eloquent flick of his eyebrow. “Eleanor, I understand more about people than you ever will.”

  “No you don’t!”

  “Yes I do,” he returned serenely. “You see, I look at them as persons. To you they’re like these mathematical equations you’re always figuring out for the engineers.”

  Eleanor twisted a poinsettia leaf, considering. “You and I are very different, aren’t we, Kester?”

  He nodded. “Very. You’re always surprising me.”

  “Which of us do you suppose is right?”

  “Oh Eleanor, people aren’t right or wrong. They’re different. Like blue eyes and brown eyes.” Kester turned off the highway into the cotton-road leading to the levee.

  “Is that why you and I have so much fun together?—because we’re so different?”

  “That’s probably one reason.”

  “Strange, isn’t it? You and I—born in the same state, of the same race, the same generation, yet in so many ways we’re unlike.” She paused a moment, and added, “I believe I know what it is.”

  “What?” he asked, casually, as though it were not very important.

  “You’re a Southerner,” Eleanor said, “and I’m an American.”

  Kester grinned. “You’re bewitching,” he told her, “and I’m appreciative. Well, you’ll probably amount to something, and when I die they’ll write on my tombstone ‘Here lies a man who had a grand time.’”

  She laughed. They had reached the levee, and Kester walked to the tent with her. At the door he said, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” and smiled at her admiringly. “You’re very fetching above those red flowers. In fact, you’re a splendid person.”

  “So are you,” said Eleanor.

  She watched him climb the levee. He was lithe as a dancer. At the crest he turned and waved. Smiling to herself, as he went on out of sight Eleanor separated one poinsettia from the rest and began counting off the petals.

  “He loves me, he’s the sparking kind, he loves me, he’s the sparking kind—”

  It came out even, on “He’s the sparking kind.” Eleanor threw down the stem, called herself a goose for trusting a flower, and went indoors.

  2

  Kester sang to himself as he drove back toward home. He was not given to thinking ahead of the moment in time he happened to be occupying, but he knew he enjoyed being with Eleanor more than with any other girl he had ever known and he wished she were not so scrupulous about her work so they could have more time together. Leaving his car by the front steps he ran into the house. His mother and father were in the parlor, evidently engaged in earnest conversation. Denis stood by the fire and Lysiane sat near him, looking up with troubled attention. As Kester came in he heard Denis say, “It can’t go any further.”

  Kester tossed his overcoat on the sofa and came to the fire. “Hello,” he greeted them.

  “Where have you been?” his father asked.

  “Seeing Nellie home.”

  “I thought so,” Lysiane murmured half under her breath.

  Kester started to poke the fire.

  His father made a gesture of exasperation toward Lysiane. Kester turned around, leaning his shoulders against the mantel and surveying his parents nonchalantly.

  “You don’t like Eleanor, do you?”

  “We don’t dislike her, Kester,” Lysiane corrected him. “But—” she hesitated.

  “But she shocks you, doesn’t she?” he persisted. “You were displeased the first time you saw her when she made that remark about sitting down in a bustle, weren’t you? You don’t understand her father’s letting her live in a levee camp, do you? You’re missing the Carnival balls so you can stay here and keep an eye on her, aren’t you?” He shook his head at them shrewdly. “I’m not impressed. She’s the nicest girl I know.”

  “I have no doubt, Kester,” said Denis, “that Eleanor
Upjohn is a very deserving girl. But after all,” he added tersely, “there is something called background, and your mother and I are not alone in believing it has value.”

  “You are alone, though,” said Kester, “if you believe we’re the only people who have it.” He strolled over to the sofa and sat down, stretching his legs in front of him.

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Lysiane. She turned her chair so that she was facing him, and spoke with a rare abruptness. “I’ve never been called a snob in my life, Kester, and I’m not risking any such description now when I say that Eleanor Upjohn is not one of us.”

  It was not easy to make Kester talk seriously about anything. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it lengthwise between his thumb and forefinger. He did not light it, because his mother disliked tobacco smoke, but he looked at it as though he found it more interesting than this conversation. “Why not?” he asked ingenuously.

  Denis answered. “Eleanor Upjohn’s mother came from heaven knows where and was brought up in an orphan asylum. Her father is the illegitimate son of a prostitute and a carpetbagger.”

  “How do you know that?” Kester demanded shortly.

  “About her father? I’ve just remembered it. Ever since I met that girl I’ve been trying to think where I had heard the name Upjohn. Then I recalled a story I had heard from my mother.”

  “What was your mother doing,” Kester inquired, “associating with prostitutes and carpetbaggers?”

  “I’d prefer you to speak of my mother in more respectful terms, Kester. Not long before the war she gave work to a girl who came here one day asking for charity. Some time later the girl left, and nothing was heard of her till she reappeared during the Reconstruction period as the mistress of a tax-gatherer of the most vicious type. A child was born of that association.”

  “Fred Upjohn?”

  “Yes.”

  Kester swung one leg across the other. His eyes shifted from Denis to Lysiane and back to Denis. “So I’m expected to blame Eleanor for that, am I? Honestly, I’d thought better of you.”

  “Kester,” Lysiane said reprovingly. She came to sit by him on the sofa. “We aren’t trying to cast any aspersions on Eleanor Upjohn,” she went on with gentle insistence. “But her people are common. It’s inevitable that she should have absorbed some of their commonness.” Kester did not answer and Lysiane went on, her voice low and pleading. “Don’t you see, my dear boy, we are simply trying to save you for your own sake? You and she are too different to have any basis for permanent understanding!”

  “Permanent—?” Kester got up from the sofa. He stared at them. “Holy smoke, do you think I want to marry her?”

  They were silent.

  “Hell and high water,” said Kester slowly. “I do!”

  He burst out laughing. “I do!” he repeated. Snatching up his overcoat he started to scramble into it.

  “Kester!” exclaimed Lysiane. “Where are you going?”

  “To the levee camp to ask Eleanor to marry me.”

  His father spoke sharply. “Kester, don’t be a fool.”

  “I’m not. You two have been turning on a light in my head.” He opened the door.

  “Kester,” said Lysiane.

  He paused. Lysiane had not moved. She sat with her white hands holding each other in her lap. Her words came with quiet emphasis.

  “You haven’t seen what we saw when we were children, Kester, the pride and desolation—two sisters with but one presentable dress between them so they could never both come into the parlor at once, the anguish and the desperate smiling pretenses, all to save our civilization from the kind of people we have been talking about. Maybe it’s because we know what it cost to give this to you that we shudder at seeing you try to throw it away.”

  Kester made a little annoyed movement of his head. “Mother, stop it.”

  Lysiane sprang up and came to him. “My dear child,” she pled, “believe me. If I thought there was the faintest chance of your being happy with this girl—”

  He was sorry for her, but at the same time he wanted to laugh. “This isn’t the old days of the aristocracy and the trash!” he exclaimed. “It’s 1912 and I’ve just found out I’ve been in love for six weeks.”

  He brushed a kiss on her forehead and went out. The sun had thinned to a golden sheen over the treetops. As he got into his car Kester began to whistle a ragtime tune. It seemed to him that Eleanor was like one of the Doric columns across the veranda, strong, clean-cut, austerely beautiful, and he marveled that his fondness for her had not long ago come to a climax. His little car panting at its utmost speed, he drove to the levee. As he burst into the main tent, Randa, who was puttering about the table, looked around and gave him her jeweled grin.

  “Evenin’, Mr. Kester.”

  “Evening, Randa. Can I speak to Miss Eleanor?”

  “Sho, Mr. Kester.” Randa lifted her voice. “Miss Elna! Gemman to see you!”

  “All right,” Eleanor called from the bedroom.

  Kester stood impatiently by the desk. A moment later Eleanor came in. She had changed her dress for a white shirtwaist and a close-fitting black satin skirt that glimmered with every movement of what Kester thought was the most regal figure of a woman he had ever seen. Eleanor gave an exclamation of surprise.

  “Why Kester! What brought you back?”

  “You’re in the way, Randa,” Kester said.

  “Yassah.” With a chuckle and a swish of skirts Randa left them alone. Kester came a step nearer to where Eleanor stood.

  “Eleanor, will you marry me?”

  For an instant Eleanor stood quite still. Then she put her hand to her forehead and pushed back her hair. Her dark blue eyes stared at him. In a low voice she answered,

  “Say that again.”

  “Will you marry me?” asked Kester.

  “Yes. Yes, of course I will.” She spoke in a voice of unbelieving wonder.

  He gripped her hands. “You mean it? You will?”

  With a happy little laugh far down in her throat she answered, “I told you I would. I think I’ve been in love with you since the first day I saw you.”

  “I’ve loved you since then too. Only I’m such a fool I didn’t know it till now. And think of it—I’ve never even kissed you.”

  “Then why don’t you?” Eleanor asked smiling.

  As he drew her to him Kester whispered, “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”

  3

  They fled the approach of the engineers and drove off together. Kester had remembered gratefully that his parents had an engagement for supper and auction bridge, and he knew them well enough to be sure no domestic crisis could make them overlook a social obligation. Having stopped on the way to verify this by a telephone call, he took Eleanor to Ardeith.

  For a long time they sat together by the fire, in the silence of a miracle that seemed too vast and at the same time too simple to need words. At last Kester drew back and looked down at her.

  “Eleanor, why didn’t anybody in the whole stupid, inarticulate world ever tell me it was like this to be in love?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe you can’t tell it, Kester. Maybe it just happens. Like this.”

  They sat on the sofa between the front windows. The room was rosy in the firelight. After a moment Kester stood up. He bent and kissed her hair, and walked over to the hearth. Eleanor watched him, thinking she had never known before how handsome he was.

  Kester put a fresh log on the andirons and adjusted it with the tongs. The flames leaped up and glowed over him. Without looking around he said,

  “Eleanor, I suppose you know I’m not nearly good enough for you?”

  She leaned back, smiling at him slowly.

  “Don’t start that. You’re everything in the world I want.”

  Kester set down the tongs and turned.
Their eyes met.

  “I love hearing you say that. But you make me sadly ashamed of myself.”

  Eleanor laughed, lovingly. “You look like a little boy caught with his fist in the cookie-jar. Did you mean this to be the preface to a big confession scene?”

  “If you think it should be,” Kester said simply.

  She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t matter.” After a pause she added, “Come here, Kester.” He obeyed and sat by her again. Eleanor said, “Can I help it if other women have found you as irresistible as I do?”

  “You darling,” said Kester.

  “I don’t care at all,” Eleanor repeated. “Or maybe I should. Tell me—”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Were any of those girls—well, important?”

  “No.”

  “Just—regrettable incidents?”

  He nodded. “Too much Bourbon or too much moonlight. Or possibly—”

  “Yes?”

  “Since I’m trying very hard to be honest, Eleanor, there was one girl who was temporarily rather important. But it didn’t last long.”

  Eleanor smiled again. “Anyone I know?”

  He shook his head, smiling too.

  “And nobody I’m likely to meet?”

  “Oh no. I haven’t seen her for years.”

  “Then again, I don’t care.”

  There was a pause, while they sat and looked at each other, rapt in the witchery that had come upon them. Eleanor slipped down to kneel in front of him. She crossed her arms on his knees and looked up into his face.